Quarto reveal.js clean

A minimalist and elegant presentation theme

Grant McDermott
gmcd@amazon.com

Amazon.com

Kyle Butts
kbutts@uark.edu

U of Arkansas

March 31, 2025

Example slide

This is a subtitle

Before we dive a bit deeper, here is a simple example of the clean theme in action.

  • No pictures or anything fancy. Just text for the moment.

Next, we’ll take a brief tour of some theme components.

  • We’ll use the same basic structure as the original LaTeX slides.
  • Note that the full suite of Reveal.js features are available for this Quarto implementation, even if we don’t cover everything here.

Before you proceed…

Requirements for the coding examples in this demo

The clean theme is language agnostic. Use it with R, Python, Julia, etc. Or none of the above.

However, this demo uses R code to highlight advanced theme features. You’ll need to install some software if you’d like to render the demo “as-is”.

Required software (this demo only)

R packages

install.packages(c("modelsummary", "fixest", "pdftools", "tinytex", "threejs"))

TinyTex

quarto install tinytex

While reveal.js presentations are HTML format, we will show an example of how to embed LaTeX tables as images. This requires a working Tex distribution, of which TinyTex provides by far the easiest and lightest integration with Quarto. More details here.

Components

Components

Ordered and Unordered Lists

Here we have an unordered list.

  • first item
    • sub-item
  • second item

And next we have an ordered one.

  1. first item
    1. sub-item
  2. second item

Components

Alerts & Cross-refs

To emphasize specific words or text, you can:

  • Use the default .alert class, e.g. important note.
  • Use the .fg class for custom colour, e.g. important note.
  • Use the .bg class for custom background, e.g. important note.

To cross-reference, you have several options, for example:

  • Beamer-like .button class provided by this theme, e.g. Appendix
  • Quarto’s native cross-ref syntax, e.g., “See ?@sec-appendix.”

Components

Citations

Citations follow the standard Quarto format and be sourced from BibLaTex, BibTeX, or CLS files. For example:

Components

Blocks

Quarto provides dedicated environments for theorems, lemmas, and so forth.

But in presentation format, it’s arguably more effective just to use a Callout Block.

Regression Specification

The main specification is as follows:

\[ y_{it} = X_{it} \beta + \mu_i + \varepsilon_{it} \]

Components

Multicolumn I: Text only

Column 1

Here is a long sentence that will wrap onto the next line as it hits the column width, and continue this way until it stops.

Column 2

Some other text in another column.

A second paragraph.

Multicolumn support is very flexible and we can continue with a single full span column in the same slide.

Components

Multicolumn II: Text and figures

  • A point about the figure that is potentially important.
  • Another point about the figure that is also potentially important.

Note that sub- and multi-panel figures are also natively supported by Quarto. See here.

Fajgelbaum, Pablo D, Eduardo Morales, Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato, and Owen Zidar. 2018. “State Taxes and Spatial Misallocation,” 90.
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti. 2019. “Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 11 (2): 39.
Moretti, Enrico. 2011. “Local Labor Markets.” In Handbook of Labor Economics. Vol. 4. Elsevier.
Suárez Serrato, Juan Carlos, and Owen Zidar. 2016. “Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts? A Local Labor Markets Approach with Heterogeneous Firms.” American Economic Review 106 (9).